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Hello :)

I’m Ayush Sagar from India and I will be working with coreboot this summer on the project “Test set-up for the coreboot distributed firmware test environment featuring greater extensibility, enhanced automation, concurrent high speed firmware flashing and decentralized operation“ under Google Summer of Code 2013.

I’ve almost completed my graduation in Electrical & Electronics Engineering and by training I’m skilled at developing SCADA applications and ladder logic programs which are used for power system and factory automation. However my interests are widely scattered around physics, electrical engineering and computer science. I have been repairing consumer electronics and computer hardware on component level since a very long time as an earning hobby. It’s quite profitable here even today as most people are reluctant about throwing away their belongings. I’m also passionate about programming but I’m new to free and open source software development.

(My GSoC application experience…)

Recently a workshop was held by MIT Media Lab at Bangalore where I had met some really awesome and genius students from all over the country and I was one of the invited participants. Few weeks after we had finished adding up each other on Facebook and Linkedin I came across something many of them had in common in their profile and that was “Summer Internship at Google Summer of Code 2012”. I looked at Wikipedia about it and I was like “this is awesome!”. Since I was not in close contact with people from software development side I was unaware of it. I visited the google-melange website and found that this year’s application phase is active and there’s only 6 days left to submit proposal and my semester exams had just begun at that time. I familiarized myself with the GSoC program and skimmed over the project ideas of various mentoring organizations. The words “automation” and “X10” caught my eye on the coreboot ideas page and I did not look any further. The project was “coreboot cheap test rig” which aims at automating the testing of coreboot test builds on target computers. After going through the documentation it seemed to be well within my capabilities. (X10 btw is an interesting power line carrier communication standard with many DIY applications.) After thinking about the idea thoroughly I had finalized a proposal and had submitted it just a few hours before the deadline. It needed some courage to click the submit button! A few days after I was receiving feedbacks and I kept on changing my designs as per the concerns. Something really important that I had learnt during the course of application is that before jumping straight to the technical aspects of a project its practical aspects like its cost-effectiveness, modularity and ease of implementation should be given more thought.